IIRC until 1965 both English universities (Oxford and Cambridge) had the right to execute their own students. i.e. one gallows for the townsman, another for the gownsman. I'm not sure but that might actually be why Cambridge was founded...
IIRC the law against "passing off" is one of the reasons why EA pay money for various sports licenses (some of the names may be trademarks also now). But I don't see that that would apply. Still, according to press releases there is this new law now called "intellectual property" which combines the longevity of copyright with the generality of patents and the ambiguity of trademarks...
Hmm, it makes me feel old that I can remember EA publishing a non-licensed non-sequel game (Jumpman).
Just to agree with you - IIRC film is 24 and really sucks when it pans around a wide landscape, NTSC VHS is 30, PAL VHS is 25 and broadcast/modern consoles is double that. For a PC 85 fps is comfortable for me... Apparently for haptic interfaces 500Hz is required.
I remember using Prolog on the mac and it had garbage collection - you could wait for 10 seconds or more for it to do its thing. Ditto for C64 BASIC. Windows sometimes feels like it is doing the same thing when it pauses the machine and randomly whirrs the disk...
And non deterministic programs are harder to debug than explicitly coded (single threaded) ones anyway.
I make a point of always walking down the middle of the road of a certain street in Central London. If I do it long enough, hopefully they will pedestrianise it. Of course local drivers hopefully know which streets people do that on...
Sheesh, a friend of mine got that amount for biting someone (a police officer - not a sensible thing to do). So yes that's light for killing someone. Of course if he was wearing a uniform (police or military) he would have got away scot free, but that's another storey.
You could write a command-line operating system... and sell it to them (Q-DOS/MS-DOS).
You could write a web browser... and sell it to them.
You could write a flight simulator... and sell it to them.
You could write a source control system... and sell it to them.
Has Microsoft ever written anything in-house?
Nowadays they've bought up the brains (e.g. herb sutter) and the brawn (e.g. anders hejlsberg) of the computer industry, but not much has come out of that yet (perhaps soon) apart from C#.
From the point of view of a developer, coming up with a good idea is great, if you get a good deal from them when you eventually sell out.
I for one didn't know McGee was a mapper at Id - I knew Carmack and Romero were developers and Jay Wilbur(?) was in management. I just heard of him from Alice, but yeah, his name is memorable. Did Michael Abrash have anything to do with Doom?
Umm, memory going fuzzy, it only seems like last year that Doom came out and the office started thinking PCs could play games too...
Typically, the original owner of a computer no longer has the original media and documentation
What is this mythical media and documentation? Are we talking windows 3.1 here, which came on actual discs with actual paper? These days PCs seem to just come with a harddrive loaded with stuff, and one I bought from a major retailer didn't even admit who made the hardware (the manual just said (c) 2001 without saying who it was (c) to!).
I go to the movies a fair bit, and I can never remember hearing a cell-phone ring. The cinema shows a short clip before the movie starts telling people to turn their phones off/to silent, and it seems to work.
Yes, it's 16-bit processor -- that's the size of its memory path, not its basic unit of memory.
Incorrect. The data bus is 16 bit, yes (the address bus is 22 bits) but so is its basic unit of storage. The registers are 16 bit. Address $4001 is 16 bits above address $4000. It takes two instructions to shift a register by 8 bits.
I might be mistaken, but I think that SunPlus licenses its chip designs from Mips. Which still uses 8-bit bytes.
SunPlus's 8 bit line of MCUs were butchered 6502s (no Y register!), then not-so-butchered 6502s. The uNSP is an original 16 bit design, which is quite nice for 16 bits. Their deal with MIPS is for 32 bit chips, which is not their current emphasis.
The pages you linked to say exactly what I just said: a char can be two bytes
Not at all. Try reading them again. In C and C++ a char IS a byte. sizeof(char) is defined as 1. But it can be 16 bits, which is why CHAR_BIT is part of the standard.
In other contexts (Java perhaps, or hard-drive documentation) it may well not be, but they are important languages. I found the FAQs and modern textbooks invaluable when I was searching for a job and the language lawyers set interview questions:-)
It is a uNSP core from SunPlus (Micro-n SP). It really is 16 bit (and segmented dammit). It would be courteous if the compiler at least defined CHAR_BIT as 16:-)
here are some C/C++ references. The chip documentation is not public AFAIK, although google picks up occasional hints.
Not at all. The C and C++ standards define bytes and chars as the minimum addressable storage unit. On my processor unsigned char is 16 bits (as is short and int. Luckily long is 32 bits). Programmers who think that bytes are 8 bits come into conflict with chip manufacturer documentation which in this case assumes 16 bit bytes, as allowed by the language standards. The processor cannot physically access 8 bit units, and the C language supports such processors.
Also note that console game sizes (e.g. NES ROMs) were quoted in megabits, not megabytes, partly to solve this confusion (although you would have to be a masochist to write C on the NES!).
Hey my machine is recent and it still has 16 bit bytes:-) cos the C standard and C++ standards don't specify octets. (The dissonance between common and formal usage of "byte" makes for interesting/confusing emails though...).
Exactly. IIRC an article claimed once that the majority of data generated is for television channels (I guess they didn't count phone calls), and that is probably stored off-line (digital tape?) more often than on a mainframe. Imagine the poor person trying to archive 200 cable channels...
IIRC in no logo Naomi Klein claimed that the endorsement of one sports star cost more than the wages of all the factories of one company (Nike?) within a certain country.
Yeah, next thing people will think of doing a remake of Pop Idol in the USA. At least they won't have to put up with that Simon Cowell bloke over there... oh wait...
A UK jailbird acquaintance of mine was really disappointed that they always made him share the cell with mingers (ugly people). Then the screws put a cute new one in... just as he was released. Dang! (disclaimer - I assume all his action inside was consenting).
Do they not serve healthy food in US prisons? How come they are still 300lbs? My friend looked much fitter (and sober) inside that I ever saw him outside.
I agree that unconsenting sex should really be stamped out; the casual mentions of its toleration seem archaic to me, but also condoms should be available when appropriate;-)
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Ouch. A Tomato is a fruit after all (and a Banana is a herb)...
IIRC until 1965 both English universities (Oxford and Cambridge) had the right to execute their own students. i.e. one gallows for the townsman, another for the gownsman. I'm not sure but that might actually be why Cambridge was founded...
Hmm, it makes me feel old that I can remember EA publishing a non-licensed non-sequel game (Jumpman).
Just to agree with you - IIRC film is 24 and really sucks when it pans around a wide landscape, NTSC VHS is 30, PAL VHS is 25 and broadcast/modern consoles is double that. For a PC 85 fps is comfortable for me... Apparently for haptic interfaces 500Hz is required.
I remember using Prolog on the mac and it had garbage collection - you could wait for 10 seconds or more for it to do its thing. Ditto for C64 BASIC. Windows sometimes feels like it is doing the same thing when it pauses the machine and randomly whirrs the disk...
And non deterministic programs are harder to debug than explicitly coded (single threaded) ones anyway.
Hey, what is this thing "jay-walking"?
I make a point of always walking down the middle of the road of a certain street in Central London. If I do it long enough, hopefully they will pedestrianise it. Of course local drivers hopefully know which streets people do that on...
Sheesh, a friend of mine got that amount for biting someone (a police officer - not a sensible thing to do). So yes that's light for killing someone. Of course if he was wearing a uniform (police or military) he would have got away scot free, but that's another storey.
You should see the NZ founding document then, the treaty of Waitangi. Three paragraphs. One page. And people still argue about what it means!
I thought the discworld games were fun! Now we just have to wait for the movies to be made of them...
No, we'd all be using Amigas, or Archimedes or (God forbid) Macintoshes.
Think of it as being the successor to the subject known as "typing" rather than "applied maths".
You could write a web browser... and sell it to them.
You could write a flight simulator... and sell it to them.
You could write a source control system... and sell it to them.
Has Microsoft ever written anything in-house?
Nowadays they've bought up the brains (e.g. herb sutter) and the brawn (e.g. anders hejlsberg) of the computer industry, but not much has come out of that yet (perhaps soon) apart from C#.
From the point of view of a developer, coming up with a good idea is great, if you get a good deal from them when you eventually sell out.
Umm, memory going fuzzy, it only seems like last year that Doom came out and the office started thinking PCs could play games too...
oh wait...
What is this mythical media and documentation? Are we talking windows 3.1 here, which came on actual discs with actual paper? These days PCs seem to just come with a harddrive loaded with stuff, and one I bought from a major retailer didn't even admit who made the hardware (the manual just said (c) 2001 without saying who it was (c) to!).
Possible explanation: The USA has air-conditioning, turned on permanently.
Scotland has heating, often by gas (not counted in electricity bill) and focussed in the evenings.
I go to the movies a fair bit, and I can never remember hearing a cell-phone ring. The cinema shows a short clip before the movie starts telling people to turn their phones off/to silent, and it seems to work.
Incorrect. The data bus is 16 bit, yes (the address bus is 22 bits) but so is its basic unit of storage. The registers are 16 bit. Address $4001 is 16 bits above address $4000. It takes two instructions to shift a register by 8 bits.
I might be mistaken, but I think that SunPlus licenses its chip designs from Mips. Which still uses 8-bit bytes.
SunPlus's 8 bit line of MCUs were butchered 6502s (no Y register!), then not-so-butchered 6502s. The uNSP is an original 16 bit design, which is quite nice for 16 bits. Their deal with MIPS is for 32 bit chips, which is not their current emphasis.
The pages you linked to say exactly what I just said: a char can be two bytes
Not at all. Try reading them again. In C and C++ a char IS a byte. sizeof(char) is defined as 1. But it can be 16 bits, which is why CHAR_BIT is part of the standard.
In other contexts (Java perhaps, or hard-drive documentation) it may well not be, but they are important languages. I found the FAQs and modern textbooks invaluable when I was searching for a job and the language lawyers set interview questions :-)
here are some C/C++ references. The chip documentation is not public AFAIK, although google picks up occasional hints.
Not at all. The C and C++ standards define bytes and chars as the minimum addressable storage unit. On my processor unsigned char is 16 bits (as is short and int. Luckily long is 32 bits). Programmers who think that bytes are 8 bits come into conflict with chip manufacturer documentation which in this case assumes 16 bit bytes, as allowed by the language standards. The processor cannot physically access 8 bit units, and the C language supports such processors.
Also note that console game sizes (e.g. NES ROMs) were quoted in megabits, not megabytes, partly to solve this confusion (although you would have to be a masochist to write C on the NES!).
Hmm, I don't think so. However IIRC the singular of sheep is shep and the singular of dice is die.
Hey my machine is recent and it still has 16 bit bytes :-) cos the C standard and C++ standards don't specify octets. (The dissonance between common and formal usage of "byte" makes for interesting/confusing emails though...).
Exactly. IIRC an article claimed once that the majority of data generated is for television channels (I guess they didn't count phone calls), and that is probably stored off-line (digital tape?) more often than on a mainframe. Imagine the poor person trying to archive 200 cable channels...
IIRC in no logo Naomi Klein claimed that the endorsement of one sports star cost more than the wages of all the factories of one company (Nike?) within a certain country.
Yeah, next thing people will think of doing a remake of Pop Idol in the USA. At least they won't have to put up with that Simon Cowell bloke over there... oh wait...
Do they not serve healthy food in US prisons? How come they are still 300lbs? My friend looked much fitter (and sober) inside that I ever saw him outside.
I agree that unconsenting sex should really be stamped out; the casual mentions of its toleration seem archaic to me, but also condoms should be available when appropriate ;-)